Dodgeball: Text Your Location To Friends

iseff writes "I was listening to NPR yesterday in the car and they ran a piece about this new service called Dodgeball. It's essentially a social networking site, except it's based pretty extensively on text messaging. When you go out for the night, you txt the main dodgeball server your location. It then txt's your friends where you are so they can meet you. It can also tell you who is close-by where you are and how you are connected to those people. It seems like a more 'sticky' and applicable use for social networking when compared to Friendster or orkut (which are always very popular when they launch and then quickly fade). Could this maybe be a decent use to social networking that will last? Or will this bust just as fast?"

Comments

Ring them?

[Coopa]

If i'm waiting for friends and i have a mobile, why wouldn't I just ring or sms them anyway?

Re:Ring them?

[Phezult]

Ah, but if you have more than five friends, it could become taxing to do it yourself. Why not be lazy and let a server do it for you?

It would be cooler if the phone had an integrated GPS, you sent the coordinate with "the touch of a button," it figured out the location (which bar) and then notified your friends with the place name. This lets you be even lazier! Their phones could even provide walking directions if they're already drunk...

Bruce Sterling's Killer App.

[bild]

In Bruce Sterling's short story "Maneki Neko", everyone has a pda/cellphone thing with pervasive wireless networking and GPS. The folks in the story are part of a P2P network whose symbol is 'Maneki Neko', and whose function is to automates a gift economy.

Say you're in the coffee shop, buying a cup. The PDA buzzes, says 'buy two'. So you do. You walk out with two, it buzzes again: 'give it to the hung-over chap on the bench'. He's psyched, even though he didn't order it, it's what he needed. Since the network has some idea of what you have purchased, what you need, where you are, what you've been doing, and what you have extra of, it efficiently moves goods (and without spoiling the story, personal services) around without there being anyone in charge. And since we have databases, fourteen people don't show up with coffees for the poor lush.

In the story, the main character is having a baby. Unsolicited baby clothes (for the correct sex) show up in the mail, along with toys, etc, sent by total strangers, because their PDA told them to. Presumably they had extra, or their child had outgrown it, or whatever. And since the network often benefits them, they have an incentive to comply with its requests, when they can.

Now other than the rampant privacy problems involved in a world that has such devices and services working seamlessly on a global scale, doesn't it sound cool? And since we're going to end up with a world that has such devices and services working (we hope) seamlessly on a global scale, should we not make such a thing?